when she breakfasted with him in his trailer borrowed from John Wayne – the eye-patch from True Grit was still hanging on the mirror. He was starring in a desert war movie called Raid on Rommel and, striking a chord with my mum, was ‘on the wagon’. A photograph by the assignment photographer shows Burton – forty-four – slim, rugged and tanned on the steps of the trailer in beige army fatigues. My mum, forty-six, is in character as the ‘wild Welsh Gypsy’, and is gazing up at him adoringly, and slightly submissively, leaning back against the trailer dressed in a full-length vibrant orange-and-black kaftan, headscarf, coral necklace and pearl earrings. To say it was a side she didn’t get much of a chance to express at home would be putting it mildly; forty-eight hours earlier she’d been collecting school blazers from the dry-cleaner’s, washing up dinner plates for seven and lending an understanding ear to my dad’s anxieties. It was a transformation. When I was young I didn’t recognise her in the official photos that came back from the Mexico trip. I preferred the personal off-duty Polaroid of her in a plain one-piece bathing suit, floppy hat and sunglasses, sitting awkwardly and girlishly on the edge of a blue canoe with her back to the sea on the day she first arrived. In it, she looked just like my mum. The idea that adults could be more than one person – one for the children, one for their partner, one for themselves – did not make sense to me for a long time.
Now, of course, I admire the exuberance and the style, the self-expression that didn’t get much of an outlet at home, but I realise she was clever too – she knew it was the side that would get the best from the occasion, especially when allied with her interview style. ‘Being ordinary’, as she called it, was perhaps one of her greatest assets as a journalist. As an ex-actress she was trusted, and of course had a great deal of sympathy with the stars she interviewed, but, for all the monthly-mag surface fluff, it is clear she succeeded by asking simple well-researched sincere questions that often got to the heart of her subjects’ feelings and motivations.
Her style chimed with the times. Cosmopolitan had relaunched in the US in 1965 under Helen Gurley Brown – my mum wrote a lead feature on Burton and Taylor for the UK launch issue in 1971 – and ‘having it all’ and pop-feminism dominated the new driving editorial mantra. Hard work, wily opportunism, lavish indulgences, frankness and liberation could all coexist in an empowering consummate life, where men were smouldering and spellbinding but also malleable and exploitable. Burton and Taylor were perfect triple-page features.
In San Felipe she interviewed Liz Taylor separately. Having been assured in the morning that Taylor was unavailable that day, my mum had sent the outfit she had intended to wear for the occasion to be laundered. Suddenly she found out the interview had been arranged at short notice for the same afternoon, and she was forced to sit down opposite one of the world’s most famously beautiful women wearing the only thing she had clean – a tatty towelling beach dress. They met in a deserted café overlooking the ocean. In her notes she writes of Taylor, then thirty-eight: ‘She looked stunning, wearing minimal make-up, her dark cloud of hair grey-streaked, as Richard liked it, and her extraordinary kingfisher-blue eyes, fringed with double sets of dark lashes, the envy of all of us.’ But my mum’s outfit must have struck the right laid-back tone; Taylor was very open and relaxed and revealed a lot about her relationship with Burton. It was, as my mum, said later, ‘gold dust’, and paid for my upkeep for several years.
Afterwards they both went shopping with Taylor’s three children, strolling into San Felipe to walk round the small local supermarket. They bought sandals and jointed wooden snakes for the kids. (My mum brought me one home in her
Now, of course, I admire the exuberance and the style, the self-expression that didn’t get much of an outlet at home, but I realise she was clever too – she knew it was the side that would get the best from the occasion, especially when allied with her interview style. ‘Being ordinary’, as she called it, was perhaps one of her greatest assets as a journalist. As an ex-actress she was trusted, and of course had a great deal of sympathy with the stars she interviewed, but, for all the monthly-mag surface fluff, it is clear she succeeded by asking simple well-researched sincere questions that often got to the heart of her subjects’ feelings and motivations.
Her style chimed with the times. Cosmopolitan had relaunched in the US in 1965 under Helen Gurley Brown – my mum wrote a lead feature on Burton and Taylor for the UK launch issue in 1971 – and ‘having it all’ and pop-feminism dominated the new driving editorial mantra. Hard work, wily opportunism, lavish indulgences, frankness and liberation could all coexist in an empowering consummate life, where men were smouldering and spellbinding but also malleable and exploitable. Burton and Taylor were perfect triple-page features.
In San Felipe she interviewed Liz Taylor separately. Having been assured in the morning that Taylor was unavailable that day, my mum had sent the outfit she had intended to wear for the occasion to be laundered. Suddenly she found out the interview had been arranged at short notice for the same afternoon, and she was forced to sit down opposite one of the world’s most famously beautiful women wearing the only thing she had clean – a tatty towelling beach dress. They met in a deserted café overlooking the ocean. In her notes she writes of Taylor, then thirty-eight: ‘She looked stunning, wearing minimal make-up, her dark cloud of hair grey-streaked, as Richard liked it, and her extraordinary kingfisher-blue eyes, fringed with double sets of dark lashes, the envy of all of us.’ But my mum’s outfit must have struck the right laid-back tone; Taylor was very open and relaxed and revealed a lot about her relationship with Burton. It was, as my mum, said later, ‘gold dust’, and paid for my upkeep for several years.
Afterwards they both went shopping with Taylor’s three children, strolling into San Felipe to walk round the small local supermarket. They bought sandals and jointed wooden snakes for the kids. (My mum brought me one home in her
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